Social networking services, such as MySpace and Facebook, are third party application services that enable users to communicate with one another and share information, such as multimedia, music, digital images, and the like. Online photo services, such as Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket, are commonly used by users who upload their digital pictures to them so that they can view the pictures and share them with friends and families. Some online photo services also enable people to share their photos with other users of the same service in a similar fashion to the popular social networking services previously noted.
To avoid lengthy cables in a home or small office environment, many of these locations use wireless routers to communicate wirelessly with computers located in the home or office. The wireless router enables the computers wirelessly coupled to it to access the Internet. By using a Wi-Fi router, computers in the home or office are coupled together in a LAN without requiring cables to be coupled between the computers and the router for communication purposes. Wi-Fi routers include a wireless transceiver and computer that typically implement the 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, or some other known wireless communication standard that supports Internet or other wide area network communications between the devices coupled to the wireless LAN and those available through an ISP. Expanded use of wireless networking in the home, coupled with the broad availability of a variety of consumer media content in digital form has resulted in an increasing number of consumer appliances being offered with standard or optional wireless networking capability. Such appliances may include, for example, A/V receivers, digital picture frames, Internet radios, network music players, and the like.
Currently, these devices may be coupled to social networking sites through a device specific or a service specific server only. For example, a digital picture frame may couple to a digital picture frame server. The digital picture frame server manages an account for a digital picture frame and enables a user to identify one or more sources for pictures to be displayed on the registered frame. The source, for example, may be identified as a particular person's photo album at a photo service site, such as Flickr. Thereafter, the digital picture frame server receives image updates from previously identified sources as those sources are changed and stores the pictures in a photo space for the digital frame at the server. When multiple sources have been identified for a digital frame, this photo space is an aggregation of these multiple sites so the digital frame does not have to query each photo or image service for pictures. Instead, the digital frame queries the digital picture frame server for the update photos that have been downloaded to the digital frame's photo space. Once these update photos have been received and stored in the digital frame, the frame commences display of the new images in the frame. A service specific server enables a digital picture frame to couple to a service application executing on the server, such as Facebook, and receive images from all of the photo albums available at that site.
While the device specific server and the service specific server enable digital picture frames to receive images from third party application services, they suffer from a number of limitations. Among these limitations is the ability to select specific content for a frame from a particular service application. For example, a user having a Facebook account may store multiple photo albums at the user's site in Facebook. The content of some of the photo albums may be appropriate for display at a frame located at one's home, but inappropriate for display at a frame located at business premises. Currently, the ability to specify which photo albums of a user or that user's friends at a social networking site may be accessed for display is unavailable. Additionally, the ability to access multiple service application sites directly is unavailable. Being able to access more sources directly and to enable the selective downloading of content from specific photo albums are desirable.
Another limitation of current service servers is their dependency on special tags to identify content on the server site. When a user uploads content to the server site, the server enables the user to identify a tag by which the content may be accessed. If a user does not label the photos, albums, or other content with a tag, then the content does not appear on the devices that use the special user-defined tags to access the content. Consequently, a user is unable to search for the particular album, photo, or other content associated with an undefined user tag.